Postmodern Anarchism in the Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin

It is easy enough to locate anarchist themes in the science fiction of
Ursula K. Le Guin. Her frequent critiques of state power, coupled with
her rejection of capitalism and her obvious fascination with alternative
systems of political economy, are sufficient to place her within the
anarchist tradition. She has, from time to time, explicitly embraced
that tradition. Le Guin is, among other things, a popularizer of
anarchist ideas. The political philosophy of anarchism is largely an
intellectual artifact of the nineteenth century, articulated in England
by William Godwin, in France by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and in Russia by
Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin. Yet this vibrant intellectual
tradition remains largely invisible to ordinary people in the early
twenty-first century. By describing anarchist ideas in a way that is
simultaneously faithful to the anarchist tradition and accessible to
contemporary audiences, Le Guin performs a very valuable service. She
rescues anarchism from the cultural ghetto to which it has been
consigned. She introduces the anarchist vision to an audience of science
fiction readers who might never pick up a volume of Kropotkin. She
moves anarchism (ever so slightly) into the mainstream of intellectual
discourse.

Yet Le Guin, like many whose anarchist views developed in the late 1960s
and early 1970s, also seems to recognize that this is not enough. Like
classical Marxism, modern anarchism developed within the specific
political, economic and intellectual environment of the nineteenth
century. In that context, it made perfect sense for anarchists to focus
their critical powers upon the twin sources of oppressive power in the
age of the Industrial Revolution: capital and the state. By the late
twentieth century, however, this traditional anarchism had become
dangerously outdated. During the 1960s in particular, political
activists throughout the western world added critiques of ethnic power
and gender power to the list of anarchist concerns. In the intellectual
world, Michel Foucault identified and criticized the disciplinary power
that emerges in schools, hospitals, military barracks, psychiatric
clinics and families, while Jean Baudrillard articulated a radical
symbolic critique of the semiotic system that dominates the contemporary
world. Meanwhile, Guy Debord and others argued that citizens of the
late twentieth century lived in a world dominated by the spectacular
mass media, a world in which consumerism has found its way into every
aspect of people’s lives, a world in which the traditional forms of
political action (and perhaps even the political subjects who might
perform such action) have become dangerously fragmented. In such a
world, the anarchist critique cannot afford to remain trapped within the
modern, industrial mode of thinking. Anarchism must become more
flexible, more fluid, more adaptable. In a word, it must become
postmodern. Along with Todd May and Saul Newman, I have tried to
describe the approximate contours of such a postmodern anarchism (see
May, Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism; Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan; and Call, Postmodern Anarchism).

An analysis of Le Guin’s science fiction will be helpful to this
project. Yes, Le Guin dreams of utopian worlds and moons, free of the
inequalities of capitalism and the injustices of state power (just as
Kropotkin did before her). More importantly, however, Le Guin develops
new forms of anarchist thinking, forms that are urgently needed in the
United States and other post-industrial societies. The crucial
foundation for this new postmodern anarchism is to be found in three
remarkable novels that Le Guin wrote in a five-year period between 1969
and 1974. This period — which marks the culmination of both the radical
social movements of the 1960s and the poststructuralist and
postmodernist movements in the intellectual world — represents a vitally
important historical moment in the anarchist tradition. This is the
moment when anarchism took its “postmodern turn.” And Le Guin was
instrumental in bringing about this remarkable transformation in
anarchist thinking. In The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Le Guin subverted the traditional binary concept of gender identity, to promote an anarchy of gender. In The Lathe of Heaven
(1971), she told the story of a psychiatric patient whose dreams
literally redesigned the world, thus creating the possibility of an ontological anarchy. And in her 1974 masterpiece The Dispossessed,
Le Guin made two major contributions to the philosophy of postmodern
anarchism. She created a fictional anarchist language called Pravic,
which underscores the importance of linguistics for any contemporary
anarchist project. And she developed an equally radical concept of time,
creating the possibility of a chronosophic anarchy. The existence of an explicitly anarchist society on the moon of Anarres has led many critics of The Dispossessed
to focus only on the traditional anarchist themes of this novel. Yet
the truly radical legacy of this novel (and of Le Guin’s other major
works from the late 1960s and early 1970s) is that these works
transgress the boundaries of conventional anarchist thinking to create
new forms of anarchism that are entirely relevant to life in the
postmodern condition. Le Guin updates the conventional anarchist project
and positions anarchism to move into the third millennium.

The Debate: Critical Awareness of Le Guin’s Anarchism

Le Guin’s masterpiece The Dispossessed drew a tremendous amount
of critical attention after it appeared in 1974, but the critical
reception of Le Guin’s work remained remarkably orthodox during the late
1970s and 1980s. Critics of this period did acknowledge that Le Guin’s
work was strongly influenced by anarchism, but they persisted in reading
that anarchism in purely modern terms. Thus David L. Porter argued that
by the mid-1970s Le Guin had “moved to a much richer social critique
and explicit anarchist commitment” (Mullen and Suvin 273), while John P.
Brennan and Michael C. Downs read The Dispossessed “as a
penetrating critique of all utopian experience, even that of anarchism”
(117). At this time criticism generally failed to recognize the
postmodern aspects of Le Guin’s writing. A notable exception was Fredric
Jameson, apostle of the postmodern. In 1975, Jameson noted in passing
that the General Theory of Time described in The Dispossessed
employs a “vocabulary of a subversive reason, which has therefore had
first to pass through the false, nonreasonable and by themselves
non-cognitive expressions of parareason” (Mullen and Suvin 266). Jameson
was one of the first to recognize the truly transgressive nature of Le
Guin’s fiction, namely its ability to call into question the forms of
scientific, technical and instrumental reason that have come to dominate
the modern West. But criticism was slow to adopt Jameson’s position. As
late as 1986, Tom Moylan was arguing that the utopia of The Dispossessed
was locked into a series of binary oppositions, and that the text thus
“expresses the continued closure of the current social formation” (114).
Remarkably, Moylan found Le Guin’s work to be insufficiently
postmodern.

It was only in the 1990s that some feminist critics began to embrace the
postmodern reading of Le Guin. In 1993, Marleen Barr argued that
“reading Le Guin... sometimes involves encountering an alliance between
humanism and antihumanism,” which resembles Christopher Butler’s version
of the Lacanian position (155). Here Barr has identified the anarchy of the subject
that is such a crucial part of the postmodern anarchist project.
Subjectivity, for the postmodern anarchist, cannot be understood solely
in the coherent, rational terms of the Enlightenment. Instead,
subjectivity must be viewed as perpetually provisional, deeply
contextual, and powerfully psychological. This is certainly the type of
subjectivity found in Le Guin’s work, particularly The Lathe of Heaven.
This type of subjectivity recognizes that the subject of Enlightenment
discourse is implicitly statist, and acknowledges that a meaningful
anarchist politics will require a radical reconceptualization of that
subject.

The recently published collection of essays on The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed
features three essays that deal specifically with Le Guin’s anarchist
politics. Dan Sabia correctly notes that the inspiration for Le Guin’s
Anarres is the “anarchist communism” of Peter Kropotkin (Davis and
Stillman 112–113), with its emphasis on mutual aid (114) and
decentralization (120). However, Sabia also argues that “not even
anarchist communism can reconcile completely the ideals of individualism
and community” (125). For Sabia, then, Le Guin remains trapped within
the basic dilemma that has haunted political theory at least since
Rousseau: the problem of reconciling the specific needs of the
individual with the broader social needs of the community. This is,
however, a specifically modern political problem, which can be resolved
through the attainment of a postmodern perspective. In the same volume,
Mark Tunick interprets Le Guin’s project as Hegelian (129). Tunick thus
joins a long line of critics who have identified the form of Le Guin’s
thinking as dialectical (see, for example, Donald F. Theall’s argument
in Mullen and Suvin 286–294; see also Widmer 44ff). I find the
dialectical interpretation of Le Guin difficult to sustain, and the
specifically Hegelian form of that interpretation even more so.
Certainly any attempt to describe Le Guin’s thinking as Hegelian must
address the disturbingly statist nature of Hegel’s political philosophy;
more urgently, the attempt to describe Le Guin as a dialectical thinker
must find a way to account for the sustained assault on binary thinking
that is such a fundamental feature of her work. Finally, Winter Elliot
approaches The Dispossessed from the perspective of
individualist anarchism. For Elliot, an authentic anarchism must always
be an interior personal anarchism (such as that of Shevek, the novel’s
protagonist). By advocating individualist anarchism in this way, Elliot
is certainly going against what we might describe (with appropriate
irony) as the “mainstream” anarchist tradition — i.e. the tradition that
emphasizes the importance of community and collective social action.
Yet by emphasizing the autonomy of the unique individual, Elliot shows
that she has this much in common with mainstream anarchism: she remains
trapped within the modern.

This, then, is the current state of scholarship on the subject of Le
Guin’s political philosophy. With a few notable exceptions, critics tend
to read Le Guin’s narratives in dialectical and/or utopian terms. They
understand her anarchism primarily as a conventional challenge to state
power and capitalism. In short, these readings of Le Guin remain
relentlessly modern. It is particularly striking that these modernist
readings of Le Guin’s anarchism remain so prevalent today, some 35 years
after Le Guin initiated a major postmodern move in her science fiction.
Clearly, the modern does not give up without a fight. Yet it is
imperative for today’s critics to move beyond their fascination with
modernism, particularly if they wish to understand the depth and
significance of Le Guin’s anarchism. That anarchism cannot simply be
understood as an updated version of Kropotkin’s utopian dreams. Rather,
Le Guin’s postmodern anarchism is a sustained challenge to conventional
modes of radical thinking. This is an anarchism that rejects
teleologies, explodes traditional concepts of subjectivity in general
(and concepts of gender identity in particular), proposes radical new
cosmologies, and embraces the anarchistic possibilities inherent in the
creation of new languages. It is, in short, an anarchism for the
twenty-first century, and it is time for criticism to recognize this.

The Novels: Le Guin’s Postmodern Anarchism

In both structure and content, Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness
is a postmodern masterpiece. The novel is relentlessly experimental and
fragmented. It has no narrative center. It alternates between two
radically different points of view: that of a Gethenian called Estraven,
and that of Genly Ai, a diplomat who is visiting the planet Gethen as a
representative of the interstellar Ekumen. While such fluctuations in
viewpoint might produce some interesting cognitive effects in the
audience, one could argue that their radical potential is limited. A
novel that depended upon the binary alternation between two points of
view could easily fall victim to the kind of back and forth, either/or
thinking that characterizes the modern mentality in general and its
dialectical form in particular. And so Le Guin must go further. The
novel’s two main viewpoints are supplemented with a host of other
narrative forms. Some chapters are extracted from fictional bureaucratic
reports that circulate among the officials of Genly Ai’s Ekumen. Others
are drawn from the myths, legends and poems of Gethen. The cognitive
effect of this radical narrative strategy is disorienting, destabilizing . . . and also remarkably satisfying. The discourse of Left Hand
can never become totalizing or totalitarian, for such a fate would
require far more unity and stability than the text actually possesses.
Le Guin’s novel refuses the comforts of binary thinking and closed,
orderly narrative. Left Hand is thus a self-deconstructing text that cannot arrive at any ultimate teleological destination.

This narrative form is entirely appropriate, given the topics Le Guin
addresses in this remarkable work. We learn a good deal about the
political structure of the Ekumen, the star-spanning polity that is such
a prominent feature of Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle. No one familiar with Le
Guin’s basic political perspective will be surprised to find that the
internal politics of the Ekumen are essentially anarchistic. Indeed,
James Bittner has argued persuasively that Le Guin’s Ekumen represents
an anarchist alternative to the imperialist “Galactic Empires” so common
in late twentieth-century science fiction (110). Genly Ai observes that
“the Ekumen is not essentially a government at all. It is an attempt to
reunify the mystical with the political, and as such is of course
mostly a failure; but its failure has done more good for humanity so far
than the successes of its predecessors” (Le Guin, Left Hand
136–137). So the Ekumen is anarchist, and not merely in the traditional
sense, for the Ekumen introduces a spiritual component into its
anarchism. The dimensions of this spirituality are approximately Taoist;
Left Hand thus foreshadows the strong Taoist element of later works such as The Lathe of Heaven.
Intriguingly, the premodern anarchism of the Taoist tradition thus
serves as a starting point for Le Guin’s postmodern anarchism.

The novel’s major contribution to postmodern anarchism is to be found in
its philosophy of gender. The inhabitants of Gethen are human, but they
do not have the binary gender system that characterizes most human
societies. Gethenians spend most of their lives in an androgynous state,
neither male nor female. However, they periodically enter into an
active reproductive state known as kemmer. While in kemmer, a
Gethenian body will acquire either male or female characteristics. On
Gethen, gender identity is therefore provisional, temporary and
arbitrary. In many ways, then, Gethenian gender corresponds to the
postmodern gender theories developed by anti-essentialists such as
Judith Butler and Donna Haraway. For Gethenians as for postmodern
feminists, gender is no absolute category, but rather something that
must be viewed as flexible and fluid.

Le Guin uses the character of Genly Ai to describe what the Gethenian
gender system might look like to an outside observer. Because he is a
permanently male human from another planet, Ai can never be a part of
Gethen’s unique system of perpetually changing gender identities. Yet he
clearly appreciates the significance of this system. Ai speaks
admiringly of the ways in which gender operates on Gethen: “There is
less coding, channeling, and repressing of sex there than in any
bisexual society I know of. Abstinence is entirely voluntary; indulgence
is entirely acceptable. Sexual fear and sexual frustration are both
extremely rare” (177). Remarkably, Ai is able to set aside the
prejudices of his “bisexual society” (at least to a certain extent) and
recognize the great benefits that Gethenian androgyny has to offer. A
Freudian would be well pleased; indeed, Ai’s description of a world
without repression reminds us of the “erotic utopia” proposed by the
radical Freudian Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization (see Marcuse, especially chapter ten).

Nor is the lack of repression the only remarkable feature of Gethenian
society. Ong Tot Oppong, a member of the first Ekumenical landing party
to visit Gethen, was careful to note that on Gethen “There is no
unconsenting sex, no rape. As with most animals other than man, coitus
can be performed only by mutual invitation and consent; otherwise it is
not possible” (94). The sexual practices of the Gethenians, then, could
be described as both feminist and anarchist. The concept of consent is,
after all, a crucial theoretical aspect of both traditions. Feminists
use consent to draw clear ethical boundaries around sexual practices.
Anarchists use consent more broadly, to distinguish ethical political
actions from unethical ones. Clearly, the concept of consent holds vast
significance for the people of Gethen; they are, in effect, practicing
anarcho-feminists.

They also appear to be anarcho-pacifists. Oppong goes on to note that
Gethenians “have never yet had what one could call a war. They kill one
another readily by ones and twos; seldom by tens or twenties; never by
hundreds or thousands. Why?” (96) Perhaps the peculiarities of Gethenian
gender identity make warfare unnecessary, or even impossible. Again,
the Freudian reading is tempting here. One can read warfare as a
destructive sublimation of the basic instinctive impulses. Historically,
warfare in our world has been primarily a masculine enterprise, carried
out by armies of men who often operate under conditions of ongoing
sexual repression. Gethenians, on the other hand, lack the repression
that may be a necessary psychological precursor to war. And although any
Gethenian may become provisionally masculine, that gender identity will
not endure long enough to permit major military action. Because
principles and practices of masculinity cannot dominate Gethenian
culture as they have dominated our own, there is much more room on
Gethen for the articulation of an alternative feminine principle. In an
important commentary on Left Hand entitled “Is Gender
Necessary? Redux” (1987) Le Guin identifies this feminine principle as
fundamentally anarchistic. “The ‘female principle’ has historically been
anarchic; that is, anarchy has historically been identified as female.
The domain allotted to women — ’the family,’ for example — is the area
of order without coercion” (Dancing at the Edge of the World
11–12). This is what the Gethenians have attained: a well articulated,
orderly society, which they have organized without recourse to military
coercion.

These few examples illustrate the basic fact of Gethenian culture, which
is that it represents a profound challenge to the type of binary
thinking that has so thoroughly dominated the modern West. Ong Tot
Oppong notes that “the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human
thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter [Gethen]”
(94). The Gethenians, then, are Le Guin’s answer to the Cartesian
philosophy and its descendents. Like Left Hand itself, the
Gethenians are self-deconstructing. They occupy no fixed subject
position. The very structure of their identity is anarchistic in the
postmodern sense. And this identity clearly represents a major threat to
the fixed gender concepts that characterize our patriarchal culture. To
make her critique of realworld gender categories as explicit as
possible, Le Guin introduces us to the Gethenian concept of perversion.
Genly Ai speaks: “Excessive prolongation of the kemmer period, with
permanent hormonal imbalance toward the male or the female, causes what
they call perversion; it is not rare; three or four percent of adults
may be physiological perverts or abnormals — normals, by our standard.
They are not excluded from society, but they are tolerated with some
disdain, as homosexuals are in many bisexual societies. The Karhidish
slang for them is halfdeads. They are sterile” (64). Passages
like this produce what Darko Suvin might call a radical effect of
cognitive estrangement (Suvin 8). The function of such passages is to
confront the reader with a system of values and standards that is
radically Other. On Gethen, permanently male or female individuals
receive treatment quite similar to that which real-world gays, lesbians,
transsexuals and kinksters must endure. This radical inversion of
values calls into question those cultural discourses that privilege
hetero-normative and “vanilla” forms of sexual behavior. The Gethenians
suffer from heterophobia, a profound fear and distrust of fixed, binary
gender distinctions. This heterophobia is certainly no more irrational
than real world homophobia. And it performs a vital function for Le
Guin’s real-world audience, by undermining certainty and challenging the
very concept of the normal. By inverting real-world gender codes, the
Gethenians also subvert those codes, thus initiating a remarkable
anarchy of gender.

Some critics of Left Hand have argued that there are serious
limitations to Le Guin’s androgynous society. According to Patricia
Frazer Lamb and Diana L. Veith, for example, the Gethenian Estraven is
formally androgynous, but within the narrative of Left Hand, he
is typically described in masculine terms (226). For her part, Le Guin
has admitted that “the Gethenians seem like men, instead of menwomen” (Dancing at the Edge of the World
14). She attributes this to her use of masculine pronouns to refer to
Gethenians (15), and she acknowledges that “the Gethenian protagonist,
Estraven [was cast] almost exclusively in roles that we are culturally
conditioned to perceive as ‘male’” (15). But perhaps Le Guin is too
quick to endorse these criticisms of her work. If Le Guin chose to use
masculine pronouns when speaking of the Gethenians, that is simply
because the language in which she was writing (American English) offered
her no clear alternatives. And if Le Guin’s audience perceives the
activities of Prime Minister Estraven as “male,” that says more about
the audience than it does about Estraven. The concept of gender
articulated in Left Hand was as radical as Le Guin could make
it in 1969. What some critics have described as limits to Le Guin’s
philosophy of androgyny are really limits of the largely patriarchal,
heteronormative culture of the United States in the late twentieth
century. Le Guin’s work attempts to challenge and transcend those
limitations. To be sure, she could not hope to overcome the entire
history of binary gender thinking in a single novel. Nonetheless, The Left Hand of Darkness remains a major contribution to postmodern feminism, and to the anarchist theory with which that thinking is closely allied.

Le Guin’s next major contribution to postmodern anarchism was The Lathe of Heaven, which appeared in 1971. Here Le Guin’s Taoism, already evident in Left Hand, was given full expression. Lathe
describes an encounter between the Western scientific ideology that
holds that knowledge and reason can be used to shape the world for the
good of humanity, and a very different Taoist perspective, which holds
that the attempt to shape the world through human willpower is futile
and potentially destructive, both to the world and to those humans who
would mold it. The connection between Taoism and anarchism is well
established, and has been noted by writers working in both traditions.[1]
Yet few commentators have recognized the powerful connections between
the delightful premodern philosophy of Taoism and late twentieth-century
critical theory. By insisting that human rationality can never succeed
in its quest to dominate, Taoism provides a powerful critique of the
form of reason that was of such great concern, for example, to the
Frankfurt School. Marcuse called it the logic of domination (111); it is
the controlling rationality that governs the West. In place of this, Le
Guin offers us the spontaneous joys of world creation. Lathe
teaches us that if we would truly make the world a better place, we must
abandon all pretense towards rational control. We must renounce all
distinctions between ourselves and the rest of the world. Only when we
know ourselves to be inseparable from the world can we dream the dreams
that will change it.

The novel’s protagonist is George Orr, a man whose dreams literally
redesign the world. Orr’s “effective” dreams — dreams that radically
revise reality — represent an intriguing new anarchist possibility.
Because these dreams change everything, they do much more than simply
alter a political or economic system. They alter the structure of the
universe, thus creating what I call ontological anarchy. When
it is challenged on the terrain of politics or economics, hierarchical
thinking retreats to the level of ontology: here, at least, there must
always be fixed structures, law and order. Yet Orr’s dreams challenge
the final recourse of statist thinking. His dreams mean that nothing is
permanent and everything is provisional. From a perspective of power,
such a position is intolerable. And so the hierarchical system must try
to recapture Orr’s dreams, to harness them and put them to use for its
own purposes. It does so in the person of Dr. Haber, Orr’s psychiatrist.
Haber is the model scientist: orderly, disciplined, rational and
progressive, in a purely technocratic way. He is confident that if Orr
dreams under his direction, then all the world’s ills can simply be
wished away. But Orr recognizes how hopeless Haber’s quest is. “You’re
handling something outside reason. You’re trying to reach progressive,
humanitarian goals with a tool that isn’t suited to the job. Who has
humanitarian dreams?” (86) Here Orr rightly raises the specter of the
id. If dreams give us access to the deep structure of the world itself —
the thesis is Freudian, or even Lacanian — then that implies that this
structure can never be susceptible to reason, for the dream world is one
where logic has no place. Naturally, Haber attempts to refute the
Freudian argument. “Your unconscious mind is not a sink of horror and
depravity. That’s a Victorian notion, and a terrifically destructive
one...Don’t be afraid of your unconscious mind! It’s not a black pit of
nightmares” (88). Haber is right to be afraid of Freud, for Freud was
one of the few psychiatrists to see that the Western attempt to dominate
the earth through science might carry a heavy price.[2]
Of course, Haber is a different sort of analyst, one who is unshakably
convinced that science has the power to cure the world. He cannot
understand the Taoist George Orr. An irritated Haber confronts Orr:
“You’re of a peculiarly passive outlook for a man brought up in the
Judaeo-ChristianRationalist West. A sort of natural Buddhist. Have you
ever studied the Eastern mysticisms, George?” Orr replies: “No. I don’t
know anything about them. I do know that it’s wrong to force the pattern
of things. It won’t do. It’s been our mistake for a hundred years”
(82–83). If anything, Orr is guilty of understatement. The attempt to
force the pattern of things — to coerce the world into a rigorously
rational framework — has been characteristic of Western thought at least
since Descartes, and possibly since Plato. Against this, Orr invokes
the Taoist principle of wu wei or “actionless action.” He refuses to
force the world down a path charted by human reason. In this way he acts
as a good Taoist, and also as a good postmodern anarchist.

Orr consistently refuses the comforting but restrictive binary logic
that characterizes the modern Western mode of thought. Naturally, Haber
finds this incredibly frustrating. “Where there’s an opposed pair, a
polarity, you’re in the middle; where there’s a scale, you’re at the
balance point. You cancel out so thoroughly that, in a sense, nothing is
left” (134). Haber says this as if it’s a bad thing, and of course from
his perspective, it is. Orr is the living embodiment of deconstruction.
He can have no teleology. He can never arrive at a final position. The
text constantly emphasizes that he is in the middle. “There was a
singular poise, almost a monumentality, in the stance of his slight
figure: he was completely still, still at the center of something” (68).
Because Orr is the node through which all reality must flow, he himself
cannot succumb to any fixed discourse, any ultimate interpretation. His
ontological anarchy is thus postmodern in its orientation. It is
supremely ironic, then, that Orr, who renounces the rationalist attempt
to control the world, is actually the only person in the novel who does
have power over that world. Orr attains this special status precisely
because he has come to understand himself as an integral, organic part
of the universe, rather than an autonomous Cartesian subject at war with
his environment. Orr can change the world only because he is the world.
In this sense, what he does is no different from the actions of any
other human, animal, vegetable or mineral. “Everything dreams. The play
of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their
dreams, and the earth changes” (161).

This is the radical message of Lathe. The modern model of
revolutionary change presupposes the existence and efficacy of rational,
independent political actors. But Lathe argues that we must
not look to progressive technocrats or revolutionary vanguards of the
working class for change. Instead, we must become the change we wish to
see in the world, as Gandhi suggested. Lathe creates the
possibility of an anarchism that will be highly spiritual, deeply
personal and yet also intimately engaged with the world. Le Guin made
this point explicitly in her 1973 essay “Dreams Must Explain
Themselves”:

The Taoist world is orderly, not chaotic, but its order is not one
imposed by man or by a personal or humane deity. The true laws — ethical
and aesthetic, as surely as scientific — are not imposed from above by
any authority, but exist in things that are to be found — discovered. (The Language of the Night 49)

Both anarchism and Taoism propose a model of social and ontological
order that is consensual and ethical, one in which “laws” are not
created by political elites, but rather derived through direct
interaction between the individual and the world. Because this anarchism
contains the crucial precept that the Western project of dominating the
earth through scientific or technical reason is ethically and
epistemologically bankrupt, it may also be described as postmodern.

The strongest and most direct statement of Le Guin’s anarchist vision appears in her 1974 novel The Dispossessed.
This novel describes a statist society located on the world known as
Urras, and an anarchist society that is to be found on that world’s
moon, Anarres. Certainly Le Guin’s Anarres has much to offer modern
anarchists. Apart from her gender, the founder of Anarres, Odo, is
largely indistinguishable from the nineteenth-century Russian anarchist
Peter Kropotkin. The Odonians “have no law but the single principle of
mutual aid between individuals” (Dispossesed, 300). Mutual Aid
was the title of one of Kropotkin’s most influential works, and this
concept was a fundamental element of his anarchist philosophy. Le Guin
even goes to the trouble of recreating the intellectual debates out of
which Kropotkin’s views on mutual aid developed, especially debates
about evolution (see Kropotkin, Evolution and Environment,
117ff). The Urrasti favor the type of reductionist Darwinism that always
drew Kropotkin’s critical wrath. For them, “The law of existence is
struggle — competition — elimination of the weak — a ruthless war for
survival” (Le Guin, The Dispossessed 143). Shevek, the
Anarresti protagonist of Le Guin’s novel, takes a very different view:
“the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who
are most social. In human terms, most ethical” (220). This is strikingly
similar to the subversive reading of Darwinism that Kropotkin provides
in his Ethics. Here Kropotkin argues that “Darwin explained the
origin of the sense of moral duty in man by the preponderance in man of
the feeling of social sympathy over personal egoism” (282). Much to the
delight of modern anarchists, then, The Dispossessed provides a clear, concise and accessible account of the major theoretical features of classical anarchism.

Yet the novel also recognizes the limits of modern anarchism. When
Shevek visits Urras, he is surprised to find that its rulers do not
censor him. “He talked pure anarchism, and they did not stop him. But
did they need to stop him? It seemed that he talked to the same people
every time: well dressed, well fed, well mannered, smiling” (144).
Perhaps it is not enough to explain anarchist ideals in rational terms —
especially when one’s audience has been so conditioned by the dominant
material and cultural system that they are essentially incapable of
internalizing those ideas. Indeed, the problem of internalization is a
significant one in The Dispossessed, and not just for the Urrasti. Shevek has a rather disturbing conversation with the Urrasti woman Vea at a party:

“I know that you’ve got a — a Queen Teaea inside you, right inside that
hairy head of yours. And she orders you around just like the old tyrant
did her serfs. She says, ‘Do this!’ and you do, and ‘Don’t!’ and you
don’t.”

“That is where she belongs,” he said, smiling. “Inside my head.”

“No. Better to have her in a palace. Then you could rebel against her” (219).

Remarkably (given the fact that she is the product of a statist
society), Vea has made a postmodern anarchist argument, one that
parallels those of Michel Foucault and Herbert Marcuse. This argument
holds that power is to be found not only in the political and economic
structures of the external world, but also internally, in the
psychological structure of the individual. Shevek comes to recognize the
importance of this point toward the end of the novel: “The Odonian
society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins
in the thinking mind” (333). An authentic, vital anarchism, then, cannot
be content simply to reproduce the logic and the critiques of its
founders. “Kids learn to parrot Odo’s words as if they were laws — the ultimate blasphemy!” declares the Anarresti subversive Bedap (168).

If The Dispossessed is to make a major contribution to the
theory and practice of anarchism, then, it must offer more than a
popularized version of nineteenth-century radical philosophy. And indeed
it does. For one thing, Le Guin’s novel offers a remarkable form of linguistic anarchy.
Building upon the postmodern insight that language is equivalent to
power, Le Guin imagines what a truly anarchistic language might look
like. The result is Pravic, the language of Anarres. Pravic is a
fundamentally egalitarian language, and this is true at the deepest
level of structure and grammar. Pravic avoids the possessive pronouns,
even (especially?) in those cases where an English speaker might be
particularly committed to the possessive form (as with family
relationships). “The singular forms of the possessive pronouns in Pravic
were used mostly for emphasis; idiom avoided them. Little children
might say ‘my mother,’ but very soon they learned to say ‘the mother’”
(58). Similarly, Pravic has no way to speak about property. When
Anarresti wish to speak of the “propertied class,” the must use the
Iotic language of Urras to do so, for Pravic has no equivalent term
(42). This means that ideas regarding the accumulation of private wealth
or class divisions based upon such accumulation are quite literally
unthinkable in Pravic. The implications are profound. The Anarresti
cannot be capitalist, because they lack the vocabulary of capitalism.

Pravic problematizes the easy distinctions that English speakers make
between “work” and “play” — and rightly so, from an anarchist viewpoint.
The idea that “work” is something exploitative and alienating, done
from strict necessity and redeemed only by leisure time, is fundamental
to the capitalist mode of social organization. Pravic, on the other
hand, uses the same word for “work” and “play” (92). A separate word,
the eminently descriptive kleggich, is used to describe drudgery (Ibid.).
Again, one is reminded of Eros and Civilization (see Marcuse 214ff).
Andrew Reynolds is thus quite right to suggest that the Odonians have
tried “to rehabilitate work in Marcusian fashion” (Davis and Stillman
87). The argument is clear: on Anarres, meaningful, authentic, creative
work is indistinguishable from play. Such work may be done for its own
sake, and need not (must not!) be inscribed within the alienating
framework of a market economy.

Pravic clearly has much to recommend it. The Terran ambassador Keng
speaks admiringly of the tongue: “I don’t know your language. I am told
that it’s a most interesting one, the only rationally invented language
that has become the tongue of a great people” (339). Yet here is
Pravic’s fatal flaw. Though it is light years beyond American English in
terms of its social consciousness, its ethics, its sense of equality
and justice, Pravic is still limited by the horizons of human
rationality. Pravic was invented by an Odonian called Farigv, and
“Farigv didn’t provide any swear words when he invented the language, or
if he did his computers didn’t understand the necessity” (234). Here
one is reminded of Dr. Haber, who proceeded from the best humanist
intentions, but was doomed to failure by his rejection of the
irrational. Language cannot be purely rational, for the humans who speak
it certainly are not. Language must be able to express not only logical
concepts but also emotions, even those that might be seen as
undesirable from the perspective of social engineering. When Shevek
needs to swear, he must switch to Iotic: “‘Hell!’ he said aloud. Pravic
was not a good swearing language. It is hard to swear when sex is not
dirty and blasphemy does not exist” (258). Ironically, the success of
Odonianism sets the stage for its failures. Pravic is a fair language
and a just one. It encourages egalitarian thinking and actively works
against the establishment of hierarchy. Yet it remains dry and sterile.
This brings us back to the message of postmodern anarchism: the world
cannot be saved through the articulation of a rational revolutionary
philosophy, even if that philosophy does contain admirable elements.

Fortunately, The Dispossessed does contain one element that is
truly revolutionary in the postmodern sense, and that is Shevek’s
General Temporal Theory. Shevek is a theoretical physicist; his term for
his field of study is chronosophy. This gives us an important clue as to the nature and significance of his theories. What Shevek is working on is a philosophy of time.
Le Guin’s text makes it quite clear that this philosophy has radical
political implications. The Urrasti physicist Oiie observes that “The
politician and the physicist both deal with things as they are, with
real forces, the basic laws of the world” (203). Naturally, Shevek
rejects Oiie’s statist formulation. And yet Shevek does accept Oiie’s
basic insight: that there is a politics of physics, and a physics of
politics. Of course, for an anarchist like Shevek, politics and ethics
are virtually coterminous. Thus Shevek acknowledges that “chronosophy
does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to
separate cause and effect, means and end” (225). Thus, Shevek’s attempt
to articulate a General Temporal Theory is also, fundamentally, an
attempt to create a viable and vibrant ethical theory.

Shevek’s objective is to bring together two apparently contradictory
fields of physics, known as Sequency and Simultaneity. Sequency deals
with the linear concept of time, which has dominated the perception of
history in the West. Simultaneity acknowledges and endorses the
nonlinear, including in particular those philosophies that see time as
cyclical or recursive. Shevek describes the two concepts of time: “So
then time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river,
without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or
creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is
chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or
seasons or promises” (223). Shevek’s invocation of promises is
interesting, for it recalls Nietzsche’s definition of the human being as
an animal with the right to make promises (Genealogy of Morals,
second essay, section 2). Shevek even makes the Nietzschean element of
his thinking explicit: “And so, when the mystic makes the reconnection
of his reason and his unconscious, he sees all becoming as one being,
and understands the eternal return” (Le Guin, The Dispossessed
222). In this remarkable passage, Shevek acknowledges that the project
he is pursuing in the physical sciences is parallel to the project
Nietzsche undertook in philosophy. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
Nietzsche famously described his world-shaking vision of eternal return:
“everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of
being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the
year of being” (217). In Zarathustra, Nietzsche dreamed of a
being who could not only accept the terrifying thought of eternal
recurrence but could actively embrace it, cherish it, celebrate it. He
called this being Overman.

To a remarkable extent, Le Guin’s Shevek completes the project outlined in Zarathustra.
Shevek embraces the principle of eternal return embodied in the theory
of Simultaneity. Remarkably, he is also able to continue thinking of
time in linear or Sequential terms as well. He can do this only because,
as Heidegger has argued, “the overman is the expressly willed negation
of the previous essence of man. Within metaphysics man is experienced as
the rational animal” (III 217). Shevek is a scientist, but he is not a
rationalist. A purely rational science could not produce his temporal
theory. To achieve this theory, Shevek must give up a great deal. He
must abandon a restrictive rationalism, and with it the humanism that
dominated the intellectual history of the West until Nietzsche
(Heidegger’s “previous essence of man”). In short, to achieve his goals
in physics, Shevek must take a postmodern turn. Thus Andrew Reynolds is
right to argue (albeit in a somewhat different context) that “The Dispossessed
is equally the product of anarchism and Nietzschean postmodernism”
(Davis and Stillman 88). As an Odonian, Shevek has already internalized
the basic principles of modern anarchism. When he moves beyond
rationalism and humanism to grasp a radically new concept of time, he
takes his anarchism a step further. Ellen Rigsby is quite correct to
note that by embracing the cyclical concept of time, Shevek challenges
the entire mainstream intellectual tradition of Europe; thus “Shevek’s
thoughts move into an explicitly anarchist form” (Davis and Stillman
173). More precisely, by accepting Simultaneity as well as Sequency,
Shevek becomes a postmodern anarchist.

I must therefore challenge the extensive body of literature that
characterizes Shevek’s reconciliation of Sequency and Simultaneity as an
example of Le Guin’s “dialectical thinking” (see, for example, Bittner
121). Most recently, Tony Burns has argued that Shevek “like his creator
is a thoroughgoing ‘dialectical’ thinker” (Davis and Stillman 199)
whose attitude towards time “demonstrates a tendency for him to think in
terms of those ‘binary oppositions,’ such as that between the notion of
‘Being’ and the notion of ‘Becoming,’ which have been central to the
Western philosophical tradition from the time of the ancient Greeks, and
which are rejected by Nietzsche, postmodernism, and the ‘academic
left’” (201). Burns attempts to relate Shevek’s theory to the Hegelian
philosophical method, to show that The Dispossessed is a
“modern” rather than a “postmodern” work, and that Shevek’s views on
science “fall firmly within the classical anarchist tradition” (203).
There are serious problems with this approach. First and foremost, there
is no dialectical reconciliation of Sequency and Simultaneity in The Dispossessed.
Shevek develops the ability to think both thoughts together, but not in
a synthetic way. The two thoughts remain separate and distinct. Rather
than a synthetic reconciliation of thesis and antithesis, Shevek’s
theory represents the perpetual embrace of two theories that are and
remain contradictory. Shevek’s experience of time is thus an experience
of permanent cognitive dissonance. He is prepared to experience time as
both linear and cyclical at every moment of his life, and he must never
allow this experience to solidify into a stagnant synthesis.

Shevek’s views on time must remain tentative, provisional, unresolved —
in short, postmodern. He must abandon the false certainties of reason.
His rewards for doing so are substantial. The major practical benefit of
Shevek’s theory is that it will permit the creation of the ansible, a
device that will allow instantaneous interstellar communication. Thus
Shevek’s theory creates the opportunity for an infinite proliferation of
discourse without resolution: a truly postmodern possibility. Indeed,
this is more than a mere possibility. For the universe that Shevek made
is the universe of Genly Ai’s Ekumen: a community of worlds linked
together in radically egalitarian, non-hierarchical fashion by the
ansible. Thus the conclusion of The Dispossessed points back to The Left Hand of Darkness.
This is a beautiful statement of time’s circle, and a powerful
structural assertion of the anarchistic possibilities that emerge when
we embrace the contradictory aspects of sequential and simultaneous
time.

Ursula Le Guin’s writing shows a remarkable knowledge of — and a deep
respect for — the classical anarchist tradition. It is hardly
surprising, then, that her critics should focus mainly on the ways in
which her work builds upon that tradition. Yet criticism must do more
than this, for Le Guin certainly does. Le Guin’s novels of the late
1960s and early 1970s offer anarchist possibilities that extend well
beyond the horizons of the modern. In these novels, Le Guin experiments
with androgyny, subverts rational ontologies, articulates anarchist
languages, and proposes a radical philosophy of time. The themes of
postmodern anarchism are clearly present in her work. So far these
themes have remained largely hidden, but it is time to bring them to the
surface. Modern anarchists need not fear this critical project, for the
postmodern elements of Le Guin’s anarchism do not oppose that
philosophy’s modern elements. Rather, the modern and postmodern aspects
of Le Guin’s anarchism are part of a permanent, ongoing, open-ended
dialogue about the possibilities of anarchist thinking in the
contemporary era. Such a dialogue can only enrich anarchist theory.